A CHARITABLE couple are appealing for help to get hundreds of football shirts to Africa after being overwhelmed by generous donations.

Primary school teachers Peter Nestor of Linthorpe and Rochelle Lombard of Marske, will spend their honeymoon working with children orphaned by AIDS in Tanzania, after tying the knot at St Peter’s Church in South Bank on August 28.

The couple had planned to take unwanted football shirts with them to give to the football-mad youngsters.

But after their pupils and kind-hearted Teessiders gave them over 200 football shirts they now need to find some other way to get them to Africa.

Rochelle, 25, said: “The response from the kids was great. I think it was made very real because it was the World Cup and because it was their teacher that was going.

“This was something a lot more tactile, we were not asking them for money but for something that actually belonged to them.”

Rochelle, a teacher at St Margaret Clitheroe School in South Bank, and Peter, 29, who has just finished teaching at Roseberry Community Primary School in Great Ayton, will live in a compound just outside Mwanza, near Lake Victoria.

Rochelle, who teaches years five and six, said: “Football is the favourite past time over there so we thought football shirts would be a good link between the different schools.”

During their six-week stay the pair will provide vital teaching at two orphanages set up by local people.

Rochelle said: “We’re nervous but really looking forward to it. We thought ‘what better way is there start our married life together?’

“This is the way we want our lives to go - doing something which is a bit of an adventure and giving to other people.”

Later in the trip the pair will work in a shanty town in Dar Es Salaam, teaching in two schools, one for pre-school children and one for older girls.